During William Paden's time at the University of Vermont, the study of religion has changed. It's evolved, he might say. And in Paden's scholarship, evolution itself has become an increasingly important lens for understanding and comparing religions around the world.

This semester marks Bill Paden's retirement from forty-four years at UVM, including long service as his department's chair. As a meaty conclusion, Paden taught the religion department's senior seminar this spring on evolution and religion, in collaboration with his colleague, professor Luther Martin.

In honor of his contributions, Paden's department presented a public lecture by the noted evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral and Evolution for Everyone.

The day after the lecture, UVM Today sat down with Bill Paden, Luther Martin, and David Sloan Wilson to talk about the intersection of evolution and religion. Some selections from the conversation follow:

UVM TODAY: I asked a man at the bus stop what he thinks of when I say "evolution and religion" and he described a Kansas school board fighting over what should go in textbooks. What do you mean by an evolutionary understanding of religion?

BILL PADEN: We don't mean jumping in with speculations about divinity versus randomness.

We're interested in the evolutionary process of how human behaviors, including religion, emerge over long periods of time. We're interested in how adaptations — that have come over hundreds of thousands of years as organisms adapt to their environment — have formed dispositions for human behaviors that have become our culture and our religions.

We see religion as a subset of culture. We see it as resting on the same kinds of behaviors that have evolved in other ways besides religion — religion is one of the forms — and these include group cooperation, intuition, sense of agency, deference, submission to dominant authorities — one can go on with a long list. That's where my work starts to tie onto the biological foundation.

We see how thoroughly religions define themselves as group enhancers, drawing on divine origins, divine genealogies, stories of origin that take the group and invent it as an eternal entity and lather it with sacred institutions.

There's incredible force that comes through this process and the prestige that comes with that. We're interested in how that gets blended with the strong forces — the native forces — of human behavior and biology that are all our endowments for social life.

DAVID SLOAN WILSON: The man on the street might not know that the field of religious studies is trying to explain religion as a human phenomena.

LUTHER MARTIN: In light of your mention of Kansas, it's important to say that we're talking about evolution and the study of religion. We're not concerned about the confessional stance people take — except to study it.

Darwin firmly situated human beings in the natural world — and thus if you're going to have a naturalistic understanding of anything human beings are involved in, evolution is the only game in town. So evolution is the framework with which we start.

WILSON: Although it's a game which has only started to be seriously played during the last 10 or 15 years. For complex reasons, evolution was restricted to the biological sciences and avoided for most human-related subjects.

But viewing religion as a human creation is not new. Sociologist Emile Durkheim in the 19^th century suggested that "God is society, writ large."

WILSON: Yes, many of the intellectual giants of the past — Durkheim, Max Weber — were treating religion as a human phenomena. That's not new. But the serious application of evolutionary theories to religion is.

PADEN: The academic comparative study of religion began in the mid-nineteenth century. It did use the phrase "science of religion," because they wanted it to be one of the human sciences; they wanted it to go by the same criteria of historical evidence as other sciences. That applied to Buddhist scriptures as well as Christian scriptures. It was comparative.

At the same time, the people who were interested in religion tended to have a favoritism toward it as something that was a good thing. It tended to draw people who had some liberal theological biases and Christian outlooks. While you began to get strong social science theories — like that of Durkhiem or Weber or Freud — the larger approach still had theological influence.

Now, the field is generally becoming secularized.

Take us back to evolution. In normal science, we proceed by hypothesis and repeatable tests. In several striking biological examples — Galapagos finches, tide-pool systems and some other biological and agricultural systems — we've been able to observe evolution by natural selection. What do we have for scientific evidence and causal mechanisms of evolution in culture and human religious practice?

WILSON: Let's begin with the evidence for biological evolution. What made Darwin's theory compelling even at the time was a number of sources of evidence that together were convincing. Natural selection was more problematic. That took longer for people to accept. But the fact of evolution by descent was established by the geographic distribution of species on Earth, anatomical evidence, and so on. In some ways, evolution is a historical science like geology and astronomy — and these have a fine evidential basis even when you can't do an experiment.

That's a prelude for describing the evidence for cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is a fact in that cultures change. Our species spread over the globe and colonized all regions of the earth. People obviously had to develop practices to survive in deserts and the Arctic with subsistence technologies — all while remaining a single species. Ecologically, our species is the equivalent of 100 mammalian species. That was done by culture!

So I don't think we need to puzzle over whether evolution occurred. I think we need to puzzle over some details of what the natural mechanisms are.

But aren't those details the critical issue? Evolution is obvious. Things change! Which is very different than identifying the mechanism and what the agent is upon which natural selection operates in the human being. Bill, you write about "cultural DNA." I'm interested: what is this cultural DNA?

WILSON: As are we all! But it's not just change over time that is obvious. We see adaptation not just change. Eskimos aren't doing any old thing; they're doing things that are adapting them to their Arctic environment. Not in every detail, but in impressive detail. Cultures don't just change, they're adaptive to their circumstances.

There must be a mechanism for it, because it happened. So we need to know: what is the mechanism? Asking that is a very recent endeavor.

PADEN: You are asking about the empirical basis of the evolutionary study of religion. I come at religion from the historical side, from the observable behavioral side — and what I see is that religions form their niches in their environments. This just seems so obvious to me after studying thousands of religions: each one is forming a way of inhabiting the world — they're making a world and then they're living in it. They're dwelling in it, and it's perfect for where they are and for their social circumstances.

The study of religion I see as consistent with an evolutionary framework in that it's consistent with behavioral ecology. The ways that a human world sets itself up are comparable to the way any organism or set of organisms would set themselves up. They're making it work. So religions are ways of making it work.

I have colleagues who study religions in great detail. That's comparable to the way a behavioral ecologist would study a species in its habitat. So is that scientific?

That's a naturalistic explanation of religion, but my question still stands: what is cultural DNA?

MARTIN: We know that Darwin didn't arise ex nihilo. There was a great deal of data that was available in his time from the biological world that no one quite knew what to do with. I think those of us who study religion today are in a similar situation. Historians of religion and anthropologists are controlling a huge amount of data about human behavior — and no has ever known quite what to do with that. The older theories take you so far and make some sense, but you don't get a unifying theory of all of this stuff that we know about — and evolution seems to be providing that.

WILSON: It's doing for religious material what it did for biology.

MARTIN: Exactly. Now the questions that you raise about the mechanisms and the "DNA" and so forth: I think this is what we're still discussing and sorting out. We're not there yet in terms of any kind of consensus in the field, but I think increasingly we're seeing evolutionary theory and its cousin, cognitive science, spreading in the field of religious studies. It's a way to ask scientific questions, empirical questions. And in cognitive science, hypotheses can be tested and repeated that all contribute to this picture of what religion is from a naturalistic perspective.

PADEN: I have not come into this by trying to poke theology in the nose. I am profoundly interested in understanding the tremendous biodiversity of religious behavior: beliefs in all kinds of gods, in all kinds of places, and in all kinds of times — and the extreme behaviors that go into that: behaviors surrounding the notion of the sacred. That's really what has grabbed human beings for thousands of years.

If you see that once — and you're born into it — then you're apt to see the world through the lens of that location. But what if you step back and you see it again and again and again all over the world? And I'm not just talking about Jews and Muslims and Christians, but the whole of human religions. Then you begin to grasp, willy-nilly, an evolutionary dimension about the naturalness of this behavior. You begin to shift to a naturalistic sense that all of this behavior is nature doing its thing.

In your Eskimo culture example — or on the question of human brain architecture — we can come up with naturalistic ways of explaining these that don't depend upon natural selection or adaptation.

WILSON: There is more than one evolutionary account of anything including religion. When an evolutionist studies a trait, they're trying to evaluate it, and there's a number of ways that the inquiry can go. It might be an adaptation — which is what you, Bill, were describing as religious cultures being well adapted to their environments. But it might not be an adaptation!

If religion is not adaptive, it could be random drift, which happens in genetic evolution. I think the concept of religious drift is fascinating. Or it could be byproduct. It could have happened in the past but not the present. So evolution gives us a framework for classifying any trait biological or cultural.

PADEN: There is a very different tone to this approach to religion than one that just takes on religious beliefs as irrational. In essence, we're saying belief in God is a very natural thing, that religions are as natural as flowers and grasses and trees. It's the most natural thing to have these beliefs and to be committed to them and for them to be sacred and to have codifications to them. It's not: oh, that's a whole bunch of hooey.

WILSON: It may be natural and a whole bunch of hooey.

Do I hear you two saying different things? I hear Bill saying, "I'm agnostic on the supernatural questions. It doesn't particularly interest me." I hear you, David, saying, "if we follow a truly scientific method driven by the last 150 years of insight into evolution, we're going to see giant holes opening up in a belief in divinity."

PADEN: That's a rich question. Is there a distinction there? I think there can be many different ultimate explanations for behavior.

MARTIN: Our brains didn't evolve to do science. We have to work at it. It's very hard. On the other hand, religion is easy. Our brains did evolve to do this — whether it's hooey or not — our brains evolved to deal with the world in that sort of way. And I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.

This is why Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett's agendas — about getting rid of religion — are just not going to work. It's why the Enlightenment didn't work with its rational arguments about religion.

PADEN: To think yours is the true religion is very natural behavior.

This contention requires an acceptance of false consciousness. Suppose I am a religious believer, then is the understanding I'm having of the world a misapprehension of it — since another mechanism is at work that is causing my experience? Have I been fooled into my belief in gods by my biology, which — to those that have done the hard work of science — has been shown to be true?

MARTIN: It's a physical or biological misapprehension but not a social misapprehension.

PADEN: Yes, I would correct it that way too. I wouldn't characterize it as misapprehension or a mistake.

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WILSON: So then we ask: if it's hooey why doesn't it go away? Because it's performing too much work!

These are the very mechanisms that you were asking for: how is it that human groups have this body of information and transmit it? This is the cultural DNA that we were talking about: the stories and rituals. It's this which is causing us to act appropriately in our worlds. That is the cultural DNA and it won't go away, and we don't want it to go away because if it did go away we'd all just collapse like a Santa Claus lawn ornament!

PADEN: On the hooey factor: I'm not sure that we have an objective knowledge of the universe and what everything is all about. I don't think we should be too confident about our judgments about how people represent the universe or meaning. Science itself represents the universe many ways — and it changes everyday. It's not really the Big Bang anymore according to Scientific American last month. Oops! We take these representations of gods as representations. Everything is a representation. You only get the universe through representations.

We are able now better to see that evolution can be perceived not just as a lessening of our humanity but an accepting of all the wonderful outcomes that have come risen from evolution: history, humanity, civilization.